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Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Up and Running with Selectors ..................................................................

In This Chapter

Getting serious about selectors

Using multiple declarations

Grasping grouping

Employing attributes as selectors

Building your first style sheet

Getting specific about CSS

N

ow that you’ve been exposed to the wonders of CSS, you’re unlikely to

continue to write this kind of HTML:

<h3><font color=”red”>Warning:</font></h3>

That’s the kind of line you’d have to write perhaps dozens of times in a Web

site. Say, for example, that you have a series of warnings throughout your

Web site, each preceded by an H3 headline in red. For eachheadline, you

had to specify that it was red using the <font>element.

Along comes CSS. Now you can create a single H3 selectorin a single location,

yet it affects all the H3 headlines throughout the entire Web site. That one style

makes all H3 headlines red automatically. If you later decide to change H3 head-

lines from a red color to simply boldface, no problem. You need to make that

change only once in the style sheet rule instead of dozens of places to H3 ele-

ments scattered throughout the HTML code.

A selector specifies to which element in the HTML code a CSS style rule is

applied. For example, use the selector pif you want a rule applied to HTML

paragraph <p>elements. Or use the selector h1to define a CSS rule that is

applied to the H1 headline elements in the HTML code. In other words, a CSS

selector is just an HTML element with its < >symbols stripped off. Here’s an

h1selector (shown in boldface), within a CSS rule: